Maarten Aris Eykelhoff*, University of Twente, Enschede, Netherlands Björn Kijl, University of Twente, Enschede, Netherlands Track: Business Presentation Topic: Business modelling in eHealth Presentation Type: Oral presentation Submission Type: Single Presentation Building: MECC Room: 0.8 Rome Date: 2010-11-30 03:30 PM – 05:00 PM Last modified: 2010-09-21

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Background: Healthcare has become an innovative field characterized by vast changes in technology. While the quality of care is rising, the cost for delivering this care is increasing in most countries. This stimulates new telemedicine innovations which have to address challenges such as quality and efficiency improvements, cost reduction and making healthcare accessible independent of time, location and local resources.
Many telemedicine innovations are developed but are not successfully deployed and commercialized. In most cases, they remain nothing more than prototypes. Because most initiatives go forward on the assumption that the right technical architecture will also guarantee market success, they ultimately fail to address relevant business and financial aspects and do not reach the market.
Objective: The business model concept helps organizations to conceptualize how to create and capture value with new telemedicine innovations. Business models incorporate a number of critical deployment factors into a single model and relate technological, organisational and financial aspects. The validation of these business models in terms of viability and feasibility, however, lacks in literature. Most literature still mostly focuses on business model design only. The objective of this research is combine business model construction and validation into a single method and to apply it to an existing telemedicine service.
Method: In this research, a method combining business model construction and validation is proposed. The framework includes four steps: (1) construction of a business model, (2) construction of a financial model, (3) validation, and (4) reflection. For these steps, a multi-method design is used, combining qualitative and quantitative methods. These methods include literature reviews, expert interviews, workshops, quantitative modeling, scenario analyses, and sensitivity analyses. The method is applied to a case regarding a telemedicine service for video teleconsultation between healthcare providers.
Results/Conclusions: The result of the research includes a validated business model including critical insights that would otherwise be unknown or observed at a much later phase of the development process. These insights can be used to improve the business model increasing its viability and feasibility already at an early stage of the development stage. This results in valuable cost and time savings and an overall better service concept.